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From inception to creation, the Dark Movements Toy Theatre stage has been empty save for the settings of a blasted Welsh hill-village, and a threatening forest where trees bristle with thorns. It was started in January, completed a few weeks later, and has since appeared in two of the ten new Dark Movements paintings due to appear in my exhibition, opening next week at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre.

In the painting Pale Horse, a glimmering presence appeared among the trees, though on the stage itself, the forest was empty. Last night, under cover of dark, the arrivals began.

Here I show the early stages of work on the painting The Quickening, currently underway. I’ve included images from other paintings and drawings that I’m referencing into it. You might call this post a combination of mood-board and progress report.

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Below: the briefest sketch shapes the composition

before being worked out more completely

Below: key aspects get worked out in more detail

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Below: the foliate-patterned ground to my recent cover for Marly Youmans’ new novel, is sticking like a burr to my coat-tails, and is set to be reinvented to play a significant role in the new works…

… as is the rendering of the bird

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Last Year’s Hervé and the Wolf series of paintings, set the tone for ‘Dark Movements’

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Underdrawing for The Quickening. (detail)

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So many things are meeting in these new works: my original drawings for The Mare’s Tale (and my family history that underlies them), the recent collaborations with my model, Jordan Morley, themes of greening and renewal, my love and use of toy theatre in my practice, and of course, that old discipline of mine, long behind me but always present in my mind… and in muscle-memory… the dance.

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I am pleased to announce that the composer Peter Byrom-Smith, will be providing a soundtrack of new music to accompany the exhibition, both in the gallery, and as a soundtrack to the animated film Dark Movements that I’m working on with my regular collaborator, film-maker Pete Telfer of Culture Colony. The film will be screened in a dedicated space within the gallery. There will also be new work from the American poet Jeffery Beam, who has been closely watching my progress on Dark Movements, and has produced a poetic text to accompany the recent paintings.

Occasionally a comment can take work in a new direction. My friend Maria in Spain wrote to me about an aspect of the violet-gloved Jordan Morley maquette that I hadn’t much thought about when I was making it. But when Maria mentioned the gloves, and moreover made an analogy that really grabbed my attention, I was off and away exploring the possibilities of incorporating her idea in the new paintings I’m working on for Dark Movements, for which the ‘gloved’ maquette is a preparation.

Maria wrote to me:

“I love the ‘violet’ gloves, and the way he uses them. Reminds me a bit of a treatise my grandmother gave me, on the use beautiful ladies of her youth made of fans. What they covered, what they showed for a tiny fragment of time, what every movement meant. They used their fans in special coded ways, as a kind of mysterious language.”

I replied:

“The notion of Jordan’s violet gloves being the formal equivalent of ‘fan language’, is an intriguing one. I love the idea of the be-gloved hands hiding and revealing… as they do in my photographs of the maquette… and of them evolving almost into separate entities. I shall have to create an elaborate series of coded gestures for them, just as your grand mamma observed in the beautiful ladies of Spain, executing coquettish displays of allure by means of fans!”

“Maria, I don’t quite know how the gloves have slipped into this work. I don’t, as far as I can remember, have a glove fetish, though I clearly favour partial stages of undress to complete nudity, and I can’t deny the eroticism of Jordan’s semi-nakedness combined with those tightly fitted, vivid gloves. Certainly the jacket and the gloves together produce a fetishistic and homoerotic tone in the images. The maquette is in preparation of a series of paintings for my forthcoming exhibition, ‘Dark Movements’, and I think, Maria, that you have just upped the stakes for me in the way I approach the new works. Thank you!”

The origins of the toy theatre lie in my Mari Lwyd series begun in 1999, The Mare’s Tale

The world of The Mare’s Tale is one of perpetual night. Landscapes and buildings alike are without foundation. The ground shifts, full of traps for the unwary. In this expressionist realm, everything is fractured and dissolving, the air full of spirits and voices. The Mari itself is a shapeshifting thing of many guises, from a monstrous biped with beast’s skull atop a winding-sheet, stalking a landscape of bone-white mausolea…

… to a supernatural horse streaming through the firmament

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Preparatory drawing for the toy theatre

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Every theatre must have a curtain, behind which all is hidden until the audience has assembled. When everyone is ready, the lights dim, voices become hushed and the curtain whispers into the darkness so that the mysteries are unveiled.

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I wanted there to be a Mari Lwyd to welcome the audience as it gathers, and because this is a toy theatre, I envisaged this aspect of the Mari as being elegant, playful and feminine.

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To begin with the proscenium arch is cut from medium density fibreboard

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After a couple of coats of gesso and paint, the pencil-rendering begins

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First to be completed is the drop-curtain

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The proscenium arch contains many references from my recent series of paintings, Borderlands

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A tower within its ruined curtain-wall and a discontinued viaduct below…

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… a chapel crowned with flames…

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… and darkly twisting houses with steep-pitched roofs and high chimneys belching coal-smoke

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Candles splutter and curtains billow

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This is a restless world.

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The Dark Movements Toy Theatre, alongside puppets and scenery for it, will be on show in my Mari Lwyd exhibition

Work has begun in the studio on building a Mari Lwyd toy theatre for my exhibition Dark Movements at the Aberystwyth Arts Centre this summer. I already have a framework for the theatre, and so what remains to be done is to make the proscenium arch, drop-curtain, scenery and puppets.

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My first drawing for a proscenium was relatively straight forward, and conformed to a pretty standard toy theatre type.

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On to a more elaborate idea, based on the shape of a slate headstone. A cartouche has a Mari Lwyd design in it, and urns carry twin cypress trees. All quite mausoleum-like.

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Having warmed up, it’s down to the real work, and a proscenium emerges that contains the iconography of my Mare’s Tale and later Borderlands paintings: a tower standing above a ruined curtain-wall, skewed houses and chapels and a crumbling viaduct. Flames leap from the roof of a chapel.

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Below, one of the Borderlands series of paintings.

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Everything skews more tortuously in this drawing, and the horizontals of the earlier design are tipped. The world of my Mari Lwyd is invariably chaotic and disorienting.

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And finally, the design as it will translate to the model. It rears higher and skews more sharply, and the soft mound has turned craggy in this expressionist world without curves. The drop-curtain… see the small sketch to the left of the tower… has the drapes being swept aside by the monstrous form of the Mari in its ‘horse cadaver’ guise.

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Below: Not yet sure whether the curtain will be dark and musty velvet trimmed with tassels, or the Mari’s ghostly winding-sheet.

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I’m off to find the jig-saw!

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UPDATE

Photographs of the first-stage of the proscenium, cut from medium density fibreboard and awaiting a coat of primer.